Multiracial Britain

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For millions of people all over the world,
Britain is the land of tradition, the Royal Family, Beefeaters, Bobbies on the
beat and, above all, white people. In much of middle America, it comes as a
shock for them to hear that there any black people in Britain at all. But even
if people can get their head around the idea that an afroamerican might be
British, the notion that he could be an MP often perplexes them.

An MP? Surely, one can see their eyes say,
a British MP must be white. There are many lifetimes of war, conquest, history,
literature, culture and myth behind the idea that Britain is a racially pure
society. And in the study of history, myth is just as important as reality. But
the racial purity of the British has always been a myth.

From the days when the Norman French
invaded Anglo-Saxon Britain, the British have been a culturally diverse nation.
But because the different nationalities shared a common skin colour, it was
possible to ignore the racial diversity, which always existed in the British
Isles. And even if one takes race to mean what it is often commonly meant to
imply - skin colour- there have been black people in Britain for centuries. The
earliest blacks in Britain were probably black Roman centurions that came over
hundreds of years before Christ. But even in Elizabethan times, there were
numbers of blacks in Britain. So much so that Elizabeth I issued a proclamation
complaining about them. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
black people make fleeting appearances in the political and cultural narrative
of the British Isles. Black people can be seen as servants in the prints of
Hogarth. And in many paintings of the era. In Thackeray's "Vanity
Fair", Ms Schwartz, the West Indian heiress is obviously supposed to be of
mixed race. She is gently mocked but her colour is not otherwise remarked on.

British schoolchildren are taught about the
abolition of slavery. They hear less about the key role that slavery played in
the British economy in the eighteenth century. Britain was the center of the
triangular traffic whereby British ships took goods to Africa which were
exchanged for slaves which the same British ships transported to the Caribbean
and North America before returning home. The majority of these slaves worked in
the plantations of the Caribbean and North America. But some came to Britain to
be personal household servants. Over time, they inter-married with native born
Britons. It would be interesting to know how many British people who consider
themselves racially pure have an African slave generations back in their
family. And, of course, between the wars, black seamen turned ports like
Liverpool and Cardiff into multi-racial areas. Yet there was tendency for the
black areas of these seaports to be cut off from the rest of the city. It was
possible until not so long ago to visit Liverpool for the day and not be aware
it had a sizeable black community. Such was the de facto segregation that still
existed.

So in the literal sense, multi-racialism is
nothing new. Britain has always been a multi-racial society. What is new is the
visibility of its racial diversity. And what is newer still is a willingness to
accept that all the races can have parity of esteem. For a long time, even when
it was acknowledged that there were people of different racial origin within
the British Isles, there was an assumption that the white race and culture was,
and should, be dominant.

The creed of racial superiority was very
much part and parcel of the culture of the empire. The British Empire was built
on a theory of racial inferiority. The great Victorian writer and poet, Rudyard
Kipling, wrote extensively on the supposed superiority of the British and
talked about "lesser breeds without the law". It was the alleged
superiority of the non-white races that supposedly legitimized taking over
their countries and subordinating them to second class status. So even until
quite recently British text books talked about Europeans "discovering
" countries like America, Australia and the source of rivers like the
Nile. Whereas in fact there were plenty of non-white people who were in America
and Australia all along who knew perfectly well where the source of the Nile
was. And until recently writers talked about the Europeans bringing
civilization to Africa and the Indian sub-continent. As if these countries had
not seen highly sophisticated Empires and societies long before the Europeans
came. When you read in the old textbooks about the supposedly civilizing
mission of the British, one is reminded of the comment of Gandhi. He was asked
what he thought about British civilization. He paused for a long time and then
said thoughtfully "It would be a good idea". So fixed in the British
mind, was the racial inferiority of the people whose lands they took over that
for a long time archaeologists believed that the sculpture and carvings of the
city of Benin in Nigeria could not have been done by black people. And
similarly that the great 'lost' city of Zimbabwe in southern Africa could not
have been built by black men. In direct line of descent of that kind of
thinking is Prince Phillip's idea that poor quality electrical work must have
been done by Indians.

Racial stereotyping echoes through British
literature and culture almost to the present day. And for some time,
assumptions of racial inferiority coloured mainstream British perception of
non-white culture and art. The Notting Hill Street Carnival is the biggest
street festival and a miracle of creativity with costumes that take months to
sew and wonderful music and dance. But it is only recently that mainstream
press has reported it as anything other than a law and order issue.

However, in recent years, people have begun
to acknowledge the presence of non-white people in Britain in a positive way.
And even to talk about Britain as a multi-racial Society. Although there are
some people who would resist this description and pretend Britain's continuing
ethnic diversity doesn't exit and insist on Britain being described as a
European or white country. But although the phrase multi-racial society is used
quite frequently, a genuinely multi-racial society with genuine parity of esteem
is quite difficult to achieve. The Caribbean is often cited as a part of the
world where you can find multi-racialism in action. The national motto of
Jamaica for instance is "Out of Many, One People". However, it is
noticeable that even in these supposed bastions of harmonious multi-racialism,
tensions have arisen between different races. In Trinidad, for instance, the
archetypal multi-racial island in the sun, there is bitter rivalry between the
Asian and African-Caribbean community. The issue is equality. Where one ethnic
group is demonstrably subordinate to another, it is idle to talk about
multi-racialism because in reality one culture is dominant. Furthermore, the
political attractions of playing the race card are often irresistible,
multi-racialism just doesn't have the same visceral appeal to popular
sentiment.

But multi-racialism is a tricky balance to
achieve. On the one hand, there has to be a measure of economic equality and
genuine parity of esteem. But on the other, it should not mean obliterating
differences or pretending differences do not exist. Britain would be the poorer
without its different races and their different cultural traditions. But it
would also be a mistake to try and iron out these differences in the name of
multi-racialism. Of course, a vexed question is of the relative merit of
different cultures and cultural traditions. It is very difficult in these cases
to distinguish where objective judgement starts and prejudice begins. In
European societies, the bias tends to be that European culture and tradition
are necessarily superior. But in the words of the American blues songs "It
ain't necessarily so."

But with all the difficulties in practice,
multi-racialism is still an ideal worth striving for. Because you can look
around and see where ethnic tensions and rivalry can lead. The civil wars in
Africa get plenty of coverage. One of the original ethnic conflicts was the Ibo
insurrection in Biafra in Nigeria. But the fighting in Yugoslavia is just as
much an ethnic conflict as any African bush war. And the prospects in
Yugoslavia are a nightmare. Serbs, Croats and Muslims are so intermarried and
intermixed that Yugoslavia seems destined to shatter into a multiplicity of
mini-statelets. All ethically pure in themselves but in almost every other way,
unsustainable as modern nation states. So a multi-racial society is not just a
rosy and possibly unrealistic ideal. It is vital to understand how a
multi-racial society can be made to work if we are going to avoid further
turmoil across great swathes of Africa, Asia and Central Europe.

To have a genuinely multi-racial society
there needs to be genuine economic equality between the races. It's
unbelievable that one can talk about a multi-racial Britain or anywhere else
unless there is a measure of economic empowerment for all groups within
Society. This means making sure that there is genuine equality of opportunity
in education for all races. And that the barriers for black and ethnic minority
advancement in business and in the profession are taken down. But economic
empowerment for minorities is a necessary precondition but not sufficient to
bring about a genuinely multi-racial society. Because nationhood and society is
as much about ideas as anything else, the role of culture, literature, philosophy
and the arts in building a multi-racial society is key. The first step is that
the influence of black and ethnic minorities in the culture of a country like
Britain is properly acknowledged.

There is no doubt the history of twentieth
century popular music is very much the history of African music as it has been
mediated through North America. There is almost no sort of pop music that
doesn't owe something to black American influence. And in art, the influence of
African art has long been acknowledged on modern abstract painters like
Picasso. More recently, the literary establishment has been willing to
acknowledge the contribution of black and ethnic minority writers like Ben
Okri, Alice Walker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Arundathi Roy, Salman Rushdie and
Nobel prize winning Toni Morrison. And at the level of popular culture,
different races have enriched British life greatly.

There is no doubt that the presence of
ethnic minorities in Britain and much more foreign travel have transformed the
British diet for the better. Noticeably fish and chips have been overtaken by
curry as the most popular British takeaway. For many years, Britons have got
used to seeing black athletes like Linford Christie representing them
internationally. And much of the famous "Cool Britannia" that mix of
music and fashion, which is admired internationally, derives from different
ethnic street styles. We are also seeing an unprecedented level of
intermarriage between the races. It is noticeably more common to see mixed race
couples in Britain than in the U.S., which has had a larger black population
for longer. There can be no doubt that as more and more British either have a
black person in their family or at least knows someone that has a black person
in their family, ideas about the desirability of racial purity will have to be
examined by even the most die hard conservative.

So multi-racialism is easy to talk about
but hard to achieve. Yet as we have approached the end of a millennium, Britain
is a more open, more multi-racial society than ever before. And one where
different races and cultural influences are beginning to be positively
acknowledged and given equal respect. British society have come some way but
there is still further to go. Martin Luther King dreamed of an America where a
man's character would be more important than the colour of their skin. The
indication of Britain's becoming a genuinely multi-racial society is when the
skin colour of a British MP is no more significant than the colour of their
eyes.

While preparing the essay the following
publications and resources were used:

Diane Abbott, MP. Multi-racialism in
Britain Oxford, 1995.

R. Rees Davies, M.A., D.Phil. The Matter of
Britain and the Matter of England, Oxford, 1996